Oral History Program Einar J. Larsen Interviewed by Carmen Anderson 26 July 1972 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Einar J. Larsen Interviewed by Carmen Anderson 26 July 1972 Copyright © 2012 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. 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These oral history assignments were created to help Weber State students learn the value and importance of recording public history and to benefit the expansion of the Weber State oral history collections. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management University Archives All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Stewart Library of Weber State University. No part of the manuscript may be published without the written permission of the University Librarian. Requests for permission to publish should be addressed to the Administration Office, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, Utah, 84408. The request should include identification of the specific item and identification of the user. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Einar J. Larsen, an oral history by Carmen Anderson, 26 July 2012, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Einar J. Larsen Abstract: This is an oral history interview with Einar J. Larsen, conducted by Carmen Anderson, on July 26, 1972. In this interview, Mr. Larsen discusses his experiences and recollections of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge area both before and after it was established. CA: Mr. Larsen would you please tell us about your experiences out around the refuge before the refuge was built? EL: Near the turn of the century, I was a small boy. My father was a market hunter and he shot many ducks and geese and sent them to the Chicago market. My first recollection was of picking and cleaning ducks at home until one or two o'clock in the morning. Then we would go out the next day and peddle the ducks throughout the city. We could sell ducks at that time. I would say that a good deal of our food in the fall came from ducks and geese that were shot and brought into our home. They were frozen and used as we needed them. My father and many other men in the area did this for a living in the fall of the year. Later, they became guides and worked in different capacities at the duck clubs. In the early 1900s, there was no road out on the south side of the river to speak of. When we went out there, we went out with houses and wagons. It would take about four hours to make a trip one way. It would depend on the load at was being hauled. Many times going across different flats where the water was pretty well up to the "hubs" you might say. At times, it was necessary to ford the channel on the way out. There was a toll bridge there at one time, but some of them didn’t care to pay the toll so they forded the river. 1 The hunting and shooting out there were really something. There were many ducks and geese in the area at the time—and swan. Sometimes the sky was black with ducks and geese. There were several duck clubs all along the river. One them was the Knudson Club, run by the Knudson brothers. The Bear River Duck Club was known as the "Millionaire Club." There was also the Duckville Gun Club, Provo Club, Cache Valley Club. There are a few of the old guides still living that could probably give a little better information about this than I could because I was young at the time. Most of the trips were made to Corinne by train. The “sports” or members of the clubs would come into Brigham City on the train and go to Corinne, from there they would be taken by their club's boat to a landing down south of the present old bridge that crosses the Bear River east of Corrine. A man by the name of Bosley did most of the transferring of the men and their equipment from the train to the boats and coming back. The trips down there were wonderful. A man by the name of Joe Cook ran the "Dart," which was the name of one of the boats. Joe was a mechanic at the Duckville Gun Club. He knew where all the sand bars were. Sometimes he’d be in the middle of the river, sometimes just along the river banks. He stayed in the deeper water. He did this many times by night with no lights. It was a very interesting trip, and one which I personally made many times. Some of the people there at that time were my father, Jens Peter Larsen, and Vince Davis, a whole story could be written about him. Vince was an expert shot and a good 2 hunter. There was Dave Young, my brother Frank, Sy Knudson, Walt Hansen, a fellow by the name of Stone, Andy Jensen, Wallace Jensen, Orville Jensen, Chris Christensen, and others too numerous to mention. On one of these trips, I remember getting in a boat and a young lady hollered at me and asked where I was going and I said “for boat ride.” She said, "Let me go with you." She got in the boat and she said, “Let me row.” I sat in the back of the boat on a shell box. She rowed up the river and got up the river under the bridge that used to cross the river upstream from the Duckville Gun Club. All of a sudden there was a quite a strong current there and she pulled hard on one oar and I went into the river. She stood up and started to scream. Finally, after getting my breath, I asked her to sit back down. She rowed back down to the bridge where I got back in the boat. I was really cold . This was right around Thanksgiving time. There was no limit on ducks at that time. Prior to this time, my Dad said that he had gone out one day shooting ducks. He'd been loading shells most of the night and got up early in the morning and took one of these long duck boats that they used with a flat bottom so that when they got in the shallow water they could handle the boats better. Dad was a very good boatman. He wasn't big but he could out-row many of the large men. He said when he got back that he threw his ducks out on the wharf and counted them as he threw them out. He had a hundred and fifty-one ducks and one goose. Then he stayed up most of the night to load shells again. He went out the next day in the same place. He came in real late at night because they would shoot until dark, then row back up to the 3 landing in the dark. It was a long way out there. They knew the channels and knew the overflows and how to get in to the different places in almost any kind of weather. He threw his ducks out on the wharf that night and he had a hundred and fifty-one ducks and one goose for the second day in a row. This is not a record because many of the men that shot ducks out there shot many more ducks than that. There were not too many hunters but lots and of ducks and lots of geese. Some of the hunters even used the old ten-gauge gun, which would kick them out of the blind if they didn’t hold it just right. They would have a real sore shoulder after shooting all day. They always tried to get more than one duck with one shell and shot many with one shell. At the time, there were men like Dr. Barnes, Dr. Bond from Chicago, Sam Sherman—a man that was a noted trap-shooter and duck hunter. People came from all over the nation. They would stay sometimes for weeks at a time. Hunting usually started about the first of October and ended at the first of January. This is just leading up to one of the important things has been asked, which was about the Bear River Refuge—things that happened before and what caused it to be built. The water from the Salt Lake had blown up into the south end of the bay and destroyed most of the vegetation except some along the channels. It became a serious situation and it looked like something had to be done. A bill was put before Congress and they appropriated some money to go ahead and make some preliminary soundings of the bay in order to see whether it was 4 feasible to build dikes out there and try to put the marsh back to its natural stage. They wanted to control the water so they could raise and lower the water in the different areas which later became hunting units. I had the fortune of being one of the men that helped make the first soundings. My younger brother was also called because there was some extra help needed. We went out in the mud boat, the “Mud Queen,” to make these soundings. We were called one evening to be ready the next morning with a mud boat to take a man from the Agriculture College at Logan. His name was Windsor. We prepared the mud boat that night and my younger brother came out. We took Windsor out into the south bay and made many soundings. As we were traveling along, we would stop at different times. We had a twelve-foot auger. There were times when we could take that twelve-foot auger and just with one hand pull it down through the muck. The auger was probably an inch or a half inch in diameter. It was made similar to a brace and bit. If it got in any hard substance, we would screw it through. In those places, many samples were taken and some data was written. We went all over the south bay and clear down into Willard Bay. We were watching for a storm from the north that was beginning to look quite bad. Mr. Windsor, who was making the survey, wanted to go to Promontory Point. We worried about whether we had time to make it over there and back and get into the channel before dark. We did start out. The wind was blowing and we had to be very careful with the boat so we didn’t capsize. The radiator on the engine was leaking and we didn't hardly dare to put too much salt water in it. 5 If we’d had engine trouble, we would have been in great trouble. I realized the predicament we were in so I motioned to my brother. He was using the oar at the rear of the mud boat for a rudder. He did the guiding of the boat. It was my responsibility to keep the engine going. This man we were with was sitting in the front of the boat. I motioned to my brother and told him to turn around and go back to the overflow. We'd turned around and started back when all of a sudden Mr. Windsor realized we were going in the wrong direction. We were asked to turn around and go back toward Promontory Point although he didn’t mention Promontory Point. "That point out there," and pointed to the mountain. I said, "If you're going out to that point, you’re going to walk because we're going to find a channel and get into the river and get this mud boat and all of us back safe.” He was very unhappy about it, but it was a wise thing to do because the storm came up and we could have drifted out into the lake. Earlier, before the salt water came in, there were many ponds, beautiful ponds and pools and rushes and large bodies of water. A good deal of hunting was from "sink boxes," which were wooden boxes made out of flooring and sealed to make tight so that they could be dipped and a hunter could sit in these places with the box just even with the water. When storms came up and we'd get lots of waves, you had to get out of there because you couldn't bail fast enough. It was a real chore to set one of these boxes out in a body of water like that. To do it, you built a coffer in a small area and then start digging and bailing. There was no gasoline pump, which would have been really fine at that time. This was 6 all done by hand and in hard. Sometimes a “sink box" would break loose and come up with a man in it. We did get back to the clubhouse safe and sound. We had a good night’s rest and had a good breakfast. The next morning we headed to the North Bay. The North Bay is the area toward Little Mountain just north of the lake or Bear River Bay. With no dikes or anything, the water level was controlled mostly by the height of the lake itself. The amount of water coming down into this area from the Bear River kept the water at the outlets quite fresh and that meant the vegetation could grow until the salt water came up. We went into North Bay. We traveled down the river through one of the channels. There were certain ways that you could get in and out of there. I learned them from being with my father. We went clear to the north end of this North Bay making many soundings in that area. The wind had been blowing from the south and it blew a lot of water into that area. We ate our lunch in the mud boat and sat and talked. We were about ready when the wind changed and the water soon blew away. We were sitting in just a mud flat practically. It was very difficult to get the mud boat out of an area of that type due to the paddles digging holes in the mud and the suction from the boat holding it in place. You could hardly move it. We had to keep turning and turning and turning the boat until it took hold. It was good that one man was in the boat so that he could make the loop and come back and pick up the other two of the party. The question was asked that evening at the supper table about the feasibility of a dike. Later, it was decided to build the dikes. The bill was passed 7 in Congress to appropriate some money and the Bear River Refuge was started in…I'm not quite sure, but it seems to me that it was 1927 or 1928. Prior to the starting of the refuge, I remember my father walked to town to vote. He didn’t want to miss the voting. He had some particular candidate he wanted in office so he walked in to town to vote—some seventeen miles. Like was stated before, there were many camps. People would go out there and camp overnight. Some would sleep out without any tents, others brought tents and lived there for a few days. At one time, there was a small building built near the mouth of the river. There were many nice hunting trips in and out of that camp. I had the privilege of spending one night there myself with the other hunters. In regards to this botulism, a disease which was killing the ducks, it was necessary to bury many ducks. That was one way they had of trying to stop the spread. There was much work done in the area of the Bear River Bay and also Willard Bay and west of Perry. West of Perry, as a small boy, I went out with my father and the others that dug the holes. The younger boys chased and picked up the ducks and buried them. The first refuge manager was a man by the name of George Mushback. He was there for many years. He knew the refuge work and he lived here until he retired. That pretty well takes care of what I can remember of these things. Probably there is a few things that I have omitted that would be of interest but this is a general condition of things that lead up the building of the refuge. 8 There was one little incident that happened out there that was humorous in a way. It was during the time when the guides and their girlfriends and their mothers and fathers and all of them danced in the guide house. They threw the furniture out and spent the night dancing. Somebody played the harmonica and one fellow played the violin. I think they had an old piano out there and one of those, what do you call those music boxes, an accordion. This night they had had quite a time. It was about time to break up the party. It was getting way late and they had to get up early to take the men out shooting. They were going back to their different clubhouses and guide houses where they lived. They were loading one boat and the fellow that had the violin had put the violin in this boat and somehow or other the boat capsized. Everybody was hollering, “save the women, save the women, get the boat turned out, help them out of there.” And the man that owned the violin said, “To hell with the women, save the violin.” I think eventually they found the violin and he was happy. There were many enjoyable times spent out there. The cooks were wonderful cooks. The people that worked around there were wonderful—the duck pickers and the guides and those that transferred the food and all the members of the clubs. It was a real interesting time, although I was just a young boy when these things happened. CA: You mentioned earlier that they loaded their own shells. EL: Yes. It became quite expensive when they bought their shells and shot the ducks. It cut down on the profit a great deal so they found out they could load their own shells. They probably knew more about loading shells than the 9 manufacturers did. They would use a certain amount of powder and a certain amount of shot for certain kinds of birds. They would sit up late at night and lead these shells and then go out the next morning. They also used some brass shells that they could reload many times. The paper shells would only last so many reloadings before they would deteriorate and they would be very hazardous to use. They used mostly black powder and, at times, you’d see somebody shooting off in the distance and see a big cloud of smoke. There were really many interesting things that happened out there before the bird refuge was ever even thought of. EL: I thank you very much, Mrs. Anderson. CA: Thank you. 10